


Unknown

by imlikat



Series: Kakashi/Sasuke short fics [4]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Angst, Gen, Injury, M/M, Pining, Unhappy Ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-18
Updated: 2013-01-18
Packaged: 2017-11-25 22:24:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/643589
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/imlikat/pseuds/imlikat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the dark of his hospital bed, he tried to imagine his wayward pupil confined in one of the dank, cramped cells, and realized he didn't even know what Sasuke looked like anymore.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unknown

When Kakashi woke up in the hospital, his body wrapped in tubes and pierced by needles, he sighed in resignation.  
  
It wasn't bad that he was still alive; he didn't crave death, didn't seek it... but he had only thought that he was trading his life for something worthwhile, at the end. That he would have a death befitting a shinobi, thus validating the failures of his life.  
  
Kakashi looked up at the tiled ceiling through his right eye, and he wondered what toll his exertions had taken on his body, this time. His left eye was heavily bandaged, as was his right leg and most of his torso. There was pain, but when was there not? He wriggled his fingers, careful of the IVs that snaked into the veins of both his forearms, and he closed his eye again to await the medical personnel who he was certain would arrive soon to deliver the bad news.  
  
When the medic-nin finally left him alone again, after an exhausting hour of tests, of questions, of poking and prodding, there was only one thing that kept him from wishing he _had_ died in Pain's attack.  
  
Sasuke was back.  
  
***  
  
Not that he got to see him. Kakashi's days were full of painful therapy - chakra therapy, physical therapy, psychotherapy. It was all designed to heal his ruined body, and if all went well, in a few months he could look forward to being able to walk with only a slight limp, and having enough chakra, and control over it, to form a bunshin. Two, if he was lucky.  
  
They wouldn't take the bandages off his eye. And he couldn't get any news of Sasuke, save for the fact that he was being held by ANBU. And Kakashi knew he shouldn't feel a faint glow of pride, that his student was too dangerous for lockup in the Konoha Correctional Facility, but still, it put a smile on his face for the first time in three days.  
  
But later, alone with all the nocturnal hospitals sounds, worry crept in. He knew what the ANBU headquarters' holding cells were like, and had himself helped to subdue a few dangerous criminals, in his time.  
  
In the dark of his hospital bed, he tried to imagine his wayward pupil confined in one of the dank, cramped cells, and realized he didn't even know what Sasuke looked like anymore.  
  
***  
  
A week after Kakashi awoke, he returned from a grueling physical therapy session to find Maito Gai sitting on the edge of his bed, a bright bunch of flowers in his hand.  
  
"My eternal rival!" Gai exclaimed, and he hustled off the bed and planted the vase on a tray-table against the wall.  
  
"Yo," Kakashi greeted him with a little nod, cool as always in spite of the fact that his currently useless body was being lifted onto his bed by a pair of med-nin. The wide smile that that his hip greeting brought to Gai's face almost made Kakashi smile in return.  
  
"How are you, Kakashi?" Gai asked once the nurses left. He busied himself re-situating Kakashi's pillows and blankets, and Kakashi couldn't bring himself to tell Gai to stop.  
  
He also couldn't bring himself to tell Gai the truth. "Doing better. I'll be back in business in no time," he said, and this time he did smile, a quick grin that curved his visible eye into a gentle arc.  
  
Gai only narrowed his eyes for a moment before he reverted to his sunny smile and overwhelming cheer. "We'll have to celebrate, once you are!" he exclaimed, and he paced to the foot of Kakashi's bed, where he stood tall, looking up the limp length of Kakashi's inert body.  
  
Kakashi rolled his head to the side to study the flowers Gai had brought. "I told you not to bring those any more," he said, in a tired voice that he hoped only sounded lazy.  
  
"I couldn't break tradition, now could I?" Gai asked, and as Kakashi had expected, his voice came out softer than before. Kakashi kept his head turned to the side for the space of a few more heartbeats so that Gai could finish surreptitiously reading his chart.  
  
Kakashi sighed as he flopped his head back to the center of the pillow. "No, I suppose you couldn't."  
  
Gai met his eyes with no trace of pity in his face. "They're gearing up for a war on Rain," he said, and he wrapped his long, brown fingers around the railing at the foot of Kakashi's bed.  
  
And there was no reply to that but a nod. Nothing to say, really. It was war. It was what they did.  
  
***  
  
Gai, being freshly returned from a mission, had no news of Sasuke, but he left Kakashi with a promise that he would seek some out. Nor did Sakura, when she made her frequent visits to his bedside, usually in a medical capacity. Though her face dropped more every time he asked her.  
  
After two weeks, he stopped asking.  
  
After two weeks, he could walk on his own. With crutches, but nonetheless... he didn't require assistance to get to and from his hospital room. It felt like progress, and Kakashi began to see the light at the end of the tunnel. The long, quiet hours stuck in his hospital bed had given him time to adjust to the idea that he'd never fight for Konoha again... but then again, he'd always carried the thought in the corner of his mind that one day, it might come to this. He was resigned.  
  
After three weeks, when just walking down the hall didn't cover him in a full-body sweat, Kakashi walked right out of the hospital, and to his own apartment. The short flight of stairs was a difficulty, but his nerves were ragged from all that time holed up in his hospital room. He fell into his bed gratefully, and luxuriated in the isolation, the familiar scents of his own home.  
  
Sakura and Naruto and Gai, they came by over the next few days, fighting without much hope to get him back to the hospital, so that professionals could take care of him. But he just shook his head and ignored them, and did his exercises in the morning and the afternoon, and tried to get better on his own. It worked just as well as professional care would have, which is to say it didn't work very well at all.  
  
They studiously avoided the subject of Sasuke, just as Kakashi had expected.  
  
And at night, he lay under his blanket and stared up at his ceiling, and he thought about his wayward student.  
  
If he were a whole man, he knew, he'd break into Sasuke's cell, just to check on him. Just to see him. To make sure he was being treated with at least some humanity.  
  
And to see what the boy he'd trained, the one with whom he'd unexpectedly formed a shaky, tenuous bond, had grown into. The more he tried to imagine Sasuke now, the less he could picture his face, the way it used to be.  
  
 _If I were a whole man, I'd maybe even break him out,_ he thought.  
  
He turned laboriously onto his side, and twitched the blankets over his cold feet.  
  
  
  
\--END


End file.
